In the last decade there has been a welcome shift in our theatre ecology, with more main-stage companies keen to revisit classic Australian plays. Where once a new work by a local writer would have its run and then, no matter how acclaimed, disappear, rarely to be seen again outside of school and amateur productions, we are now being given another chance to experience some of these seminal plays, discovering not merely where we have come from as a country and as a culture but also, importantly, how we’ve changed.

While Ray Lawler’s Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, Michael Gow’s Away, and anything by Patrick White have tended to be the go-to plays for companies looking to revive Australian works, recent years have seen vital Australian plays such as John Romeril’s The Floating World (Griffin, 2013), Katherine Thomson’s Diving for Pearls (Griffin, 2017), and Stephen Sewell’s The Blind Giant is Dancing (Belvoir, 2016) restaged, while two other influential works – Patricia Cornelius’s Do Not Go Gentle (Malthouse) and Wesley Enoch and Deborah Mailman’s The 7 Stages of Grieving (STC) – will have productions later this year. To this suite we can now add David Williamson’s 1987 play Emerald City (first revived by Griffin Theatre in 2014 under the direction of Lee Lewis).